Post-Truth prophet

For the past 210 days, the prophet’s body has been inhabited by two conflicting universes: the Old Order and the New Order. AD and PT – Anno Domini and Post-Truth. She is stooped over with the pain of knowing.

In the time of the Old Order, her work had been gratifying. The prophet would listen to our individual and collective voices, and transcribe them into truths of the human soul. Within her body, thick and radiant, she hosted only one universe. It filled her lungs and eyes with a grey, ethereal, light. She was a steward of unity, transfixed to the observation screen of our imperfect human saga. Illuminator of connections between the cosmos and the populace, she demystified our politics, power, violence, sex, affection, ego and vulnerability. These were the voices – spoken, written, thought and felt – through which our human truth was revealed, and through which she was able to guide the manifestation of our love.

From time to time, the prophet used to glance behind the veil of what she was transcribing in order to attune herself more closely to the motives of humanity. It was in doing this that she first learnt of our treachery. Artfully, maliciously, we were distorting the fidelity of our own voices. At the dawn of PT, the truth had become no more than the sum total of our projected desires.

For three weeks the prophet wept and vomited, desperately seeking to abort the falsehoods residing within her. The two universes of old and new collided in her gut, the former revelling in its obsolete inadequacy; the latter in its insistence on pretending not to know. She felt these millions of kilograms of ignorance and wrongdoing conspire to gently crush her internal organs, to force her spine into a curvature of submission.

In order to survive the Post-Truth era, the prophet was forced to adopt a new tradition. Carving into her perfect flesh, she reached inside herself and disconnected every last vein of intuition: a final irreversible act of disengagement from the ugliness of humanity. Now she transcribes the world using purely economical and rational taxonomies of truth. The observation screen devoid of every former impression of order and beauty, her role is reduced to one of purely administrative function.

When her soul is at its lowest, when she finds herself drowning on gulps of air from the imprint of decades past, she has no option but to seek solace in the cosmologies of technology and the gleanings of universal truths they offer. Thus, she invokes the mantra: